Timothy J Massey wrote at about 22:46:39 -0400 on Tuesday, April 12, 2011: > Timothy J Massey <[email protected]> wrote on 04/12/2011 10:13:11 PM: > > > But give it a try first: unless that production server is a 600MHz > > machine with 512MB RAM and a single SATA spindle, you will most > > likely be fine (and if you *are* running like that, well, you have > > other problems! :) ). (Actually, I have one client with servers > > that are dual-processor 600MHz with 1GB RAM that I back up during > > the day and the users at this location almost *never* notice.) > > To clarify and expand this: they are IBM Netfinity 5600 servers. 2 x > 600MHz Intel P3 processors, 1GB RAM, and 6 x 18GB SCSI-160 10,000 RPM > drives in a RAID 5 array with an IBM ServeRAID hardware RAID controller. > The systems are old and (processor) slow, but the disk performance is > really pretty good, even today: it'll easily saturate GigE. >
> My point for this: CPU power matters little on the client side. RAM > matters, but only once you have enough: depending on the number of files, > the amount of RAM you truly need is literally in the hundreds of > megabytes. What *really* matters is I/O and network throughput--and on > any halfway-decent server with multiple high-RPM hard drives, you will be > limited by network bandwidth more than anything else. As I have mentioned before, I have succeeded with just 64MB of RAM of which only about 20MB is free. I do have swap, but it really doesn't use much swap. Now I am just backing up "normal" Linux and Windows worstations and laptops where each backup has maybe a couple of hundred thousand files and 20-50GB... but it does work... I use the rsync/rsyncd transfer method and rsync >~ 3.0 is pretty memory efficient as long as you have a "normal" filesystem without "humongous" numbers of hard links or "insanely" large numbers of files per directory. On small systems, I still find the primary limitations are bandwidth (I backup many machines over 802.11g wireless) and cpu power for compression (when I use a 500MHz Arm processor). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Forrester Wave Report - Recovery time is now measured in hours and minutes not days. Key insights are discussed in the 2010 Forrester Wave Report as part of an in-depth evaluation of disaster recovery service providers. Forrester found the best-in-class provider in terms of services and vision. Read this report now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/ibm-webcastpromo _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
